ANDREW LAMPERT

“New York based Japanese performance artist Ei Arakawa invites painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, and archivists to form a temporal group addressing Gutai today. Resulting in a performative exhibition tour where the audience will be escorted and repositioned, emphasis will be on the power dynamic within Gutai, women and men; singularity and plurality; performance and painting. Tasked to communicate the diversity of Gutai activities, each tour will journey along a different route. Participants include Ei Arakawa, Simone Forti, Jutta Koether, Andrew Lampert, and Caitlin MacBride.”

“While the finale was impressive, the most bravura moment of Concrete Escort took place earlier, in front of a long, life-size photomontage of the bespectacled Murakami Saburō plunging through a series of taut paper screens. We were instructed to line its 20-foot length, why we didn’t know. A pair of performers then produced a screen of their own, aligning it with Murakami’s first one. And then we waited. Just enough time elapsed for a murmuring to begin, ended by laughter. There appeared on the ramp below us, walking very slowly, Andrew Lampert pushing a baby stroller, and an infant, his daughter Zazie, along for the ride.

As the duo approached step after step and we stared at the banner, the violence of Murakami’s performance sunk in; when it was done, the artist collapsed with a concussion. Would they actually plunge through the screen? There was a teasing sadism to the anticipation.

With the slightest upward thrust, Lampert popped the stroller through the screen, accompanied by a noise like a brown paper bag popping. Zazie was unscathed. For the first time during the performance, the crowd functioned like a conventional audience and burst into applause.”